Number Of Smart Phone Apps Explode

"....... we now estimate, that if current trends continues, the Marketplace will reach the 50,000 app mark in the first week of January 2012. However, it is possible that this mark may be reached before the end of the year if submission rates accelerate. We'll report in more detail and provide some additional statistics when the 50,000 item mark is reached, as we did for the 40,000 item mark."

"WP7applist, a rival tracking site, is currently reporting 43,428 applications worldwide and explains 5,784 of them are inactive, 55% are available for free and the average price is $1.77 per paid application."

With almost 6,000 of those applications being inactive, I guess the real numbers would be more along the lines of 37,000 applications, which is still, of course, a lot of apps, but compared with Apple's App Store it's peanuts, as it is now being reported that it has achieved yet another milestone... an even more whopping 500,000 apps!

Upon the iTunes App Store launch on July 10, 2008, there were 500 total apps

500,000 apps were developed by 85,569 unique developers

37% of apps are available for free

The average price for paid apps is $3.64

Games represent 15% of the available apps, books are second most popular at 14% –a balance of power that continues to shift back and forth from month to month.

You would need 7.5 TB of storage to hold all of the apps from the App Store

It would cost you $891,982.24 to purchase all of the apps from the App Store

There has been over 10 billion total app downloads

The app to spend the most time in the #1 popularity spot is Angry Birds, for 275 days

Well, in conclusion, it's apparently a great time, a very great time indeed to be a smart phone developer these days. With over a half-a-million apps for iOS, and almost 50,000 for Windows Phone 7, and over some 350,000 for Android, maybe, just maybe I'm in the wrong business?